The Matchcover Storyteller

In the 1970s, midtown Manhattan was not the healthiest or most fun part of New York City to visit.   For instance, you’d belooking for 148 W. 48th Street.   Miss it by maybe just three feet and you were in a topless club, in part of midtown dubbed at the time, “Pornoland”,  

But what you were really looking for was the oldest Indian restaurant in New York and in the United States — The Ceylon India Inn.   Indian restaurants had proliferated in midtown since after the Korean War even as the neighborhood had changed profoundly (it has changed back, I hope you know!)  But in “Pornoland”, visiting this second floor restaurant took you thoroughly away from the seedy streetscape.  At the time, the New York Times called it “ a true gem in the sordid glitter of porno flicks”.

The Ceylon India Inn was founded in 1913, the first south Asian restaurant of any kind in America.  .  It was the passion of K.Yaman Kira, a Ceylonese dancer and circus performer settling down in New York.  It quickly became a gathering place for the south Asian community, but attracted the rest of the population as well.  Through the first half of the 20th century, it was the place for Sinhalese pepper steak, curries, all kinds of chutneys, fried coconuts, and even tamarind win.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, The Ceylon India Inn was known as an “unusual community center”, a place enjoyed by “grave Indian gentlemen”.   In 1930, it hosted a meeting of the “All-World Gandhi Fellowship” and the Independence League of America to discuss Indian Nationalism.   But by the 1940s, the politics of South Asian independence had shifted to the nearby Rajah Restaurant.   Kira was seen as being too politically broad-minded, too “tolerant”.  For example, in 1936, he hosted a memorial for the late King George V (Emperor of India was one of his titles); it upset other Indians greatly (India finally achieved independence from Britain in 1947)

Kira in his 60s, sold to a Bengalese owner in the 1950s who renamed it Curry India.  It later reverted to the Ceylon India Inn but around 2014 it became Bombay Masaia (now down in  in the East Village) and eventually closed  — not suddenly, but just with changing times, a changing neighborhood and so on.

Today, the location on W. 49th is certainly noted as the site of the first Indian restaurant in the U.S.   But the restaurants there are successors, rather than any continuation of an original operation..

Two of these matchcovers are almost identical; it’s the manumark that’s different.  These 4 are the only ones I have or have been able to find.